Telephone excise tax: does "and" mean "both" or "either"?

Journal of Accountancy, November, 2004 by Brown, Michael H.

When long-distance telephone service does not take into account the distance of the call, should the 3% federal excise tax apply? In two recent cases, two district courts reached opposite conclusions.

American Bankers Insurance Group (ABIG), a Florida corporation, purchased interstate and international long-distance and intrastate long-distance phone service from AT&T in Florida, Georgia, Ohio and Oklahoma from October 1998 through March 2002. ABIG paid a uniform toll rate that varied only by the country to which the calls were being placed. It filed claims with the IRS for refunds totaling $361,763, contending that federal law imposed an excise tax only on long-distance calls that varied in rate based on the call's distance.

In a case with essentially...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.